Yankee Doodles

In 1963 Dennis Kennedy, then a Northern Irish journalist in his mid-twenties, won a year-long World Press Institute Fellowship at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. Yankee Doodles is his account of twelve months that were at times tragic, at times hilarious, and which took him from New York to Minnesota, from Newark, NJ, to Butte, Montana, from the White House to the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He gives a snapshot of a very different America, one just emerging from the Eisenhower years, beginning to confront the challenge of racism and civil rights, not yet engulfed in Vietnam, but having to withstand the seismic shock of the assassination of JFK.

Yankee Doodles is based on an occasional diary kept during that year in the form of articles written for private circulation among his fellow Fellows, on other published material, and on the author's photographs, and on three drawings by the late Orhan Duru, his Turkish room-mate for most of the year.